The Mozilla Interview: Why Firefox Matters

We had a chance to chat with Johnathan Nightingale Mozilla’s Director of Firefox Engineering about Firefox’ current challenges, its opportunities, its rivals, trends and its future.

Mozilla’s Firefox experienced a pretty rapid turn of fortunes last year and is still dealing with the effects of a changing browser landscape today. The rise of Chrome, a more competitive Microsoft, an increasingly loyal Apple user base, the often-delayed release of Firefox 4, created a perfect storm against Mozilla that is affecting its market share and credibility. Johnathan Nightingale agreed to spend some time with us to talk about the current state of Firefox and its immediate future in a very competitive environment.

As spokesperson for Mozilla and as Director of Firefox Engineering, Johnathan Nightingale is one of the most influential people at Mozilla as far as the future of the Firefox browser is concerned. He has been working for Mozilla since 2007.

Linaro and 96Boards.org unveiled a “96Boards.ai” initiative along with several Linux-based hacker boards that comply with it: Arrow’s DragonBoard 820C, HiSilicon’s Hikey970, Rockchip’s Rock960, Avnet’s Ultra96, and an upcoming Socionext board.
At Linaro Connect in Hong Kong, Linaro announced yet another variation on its open source 96Boards spec called 96Boards.ai. The Linux-supported platform is designed for open source, Arm-based SBCs with “high performance real-time computer vision and intelligent audio processing, supported by machine learning algorithms and deep learning technology,” says Linaro.

As it's been a few weeks since last delivering a modest Linux GPU comparison and given the continuously evolving state of the Linux kernel Git tree as well as the Mesa project that houses the RadeonSI OpenGL and RADV Vulkan drivers, here are our latest benchmarks showing the current state of the AMD Radeon open-source Linux graphics driver performance relative to NVIDIA's long-standing and high-performance but proprietary driver using several different graphics cards.

Latest News

You Can Now Transform Your Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ into a Home Theatre System

OSMC (Open Source Media Center), the free and open-source media player operating system based on the Linux kernel and designed for single-board computers received March 2018's update with dozens of changes, including support for the latest Raspberry Pi model.
Raspberry Pi Foundation announced last week on Pi Day, March 14, 2018, the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ single-board computer (SBC), which features updated hardware, including a 1.4GHz 64-bit Quad-core ARM Cortex-A53 CPU, Gigabit Ethernet over USB 2.0, Bluetooth 4.2, Dual-band 802.11ac wireless LAN, and PoE support.
The developers of the OSMC Linux OS (formerly RaspBMC) received some pre-production units from Raspberry Pi Foundation to prepare their upcoming release for the new SBC, and March's update is now live with Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ support, allowing you to transform it into a versatile home theatre system.

Those of you with long memories may recall that webOS is already open source, having originally been designed for tablet computers under the auspices of HP Inc (or Hewlett Packard as it was at the time). Even the unfinished overhaul at the time that LG took it underground is open source.

LG Electronics is moving webOS beyond TVs with the release of webOS Open Source Edition. WebOS is a multitasking operating system that was designed for smart devices and smart TVs.
Before coming to LG, webOS was launched as Palm OS in 2009. It was acquired by HP in 2010, and then licensed to LG in 2013. Since then, the company has been using the technology for its smart TVs and refrigerators.
“WebOS has come a long way since then and is now a mature and stable platform ready to move beyond TVs to join the very exclusive group of operating systems that have been successfully commercialization at such a mass level. As we move from an app-based environment to a web-based one, we believe the true potential of webOS has yet to be seen,” said I.P. Park, chief technology officer at LG Electronics.

Red Hat News

Is Red Hat on the shopping list for Google? Could be. But the cost would not be cheap with Red Hat’s stock having nearly doubled in price over the past year. A takeover would likely cost more than $30 billion and spark a bidding war. At that price a deal would rank among the most expensive ever in tech.
A top executive for the cloud behemoth tells Bloomberg News that Google is “constantly on the lookout for a major acquisition.” Growing Google’s cloud business is the responsibility of Diane Greene as chief executive of Google Cloud. And Raleigh-based Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) is a cloud player, providing technology services and support for a growing number of clients. In fact, CNBC’s Jim Cramer just days ago cited Red Hat as one of his “cloud kings.”

The companies aim to extend additional rights to cure open source licence non-compliance which, according to Red Hat, will lead to greater cooperation with distributors of open source software to correct errors and increased participation in open source software development.

Today, six more technology companies – CA Technologies, Cisco, HPE, Microsoft, SAP and SUSE -- have all committed to offering the GPLv3 cure approach to licensees of their GPLv2, LGPLv2.1 and LGPLv2 licensed code (except in cases of a defensive response to a legal proceeding). The GPLv3 cure approach offers licensees of GPLv2 code a period of time to come into compliance before their licenses are terminated but does not involve the relicensing of the code under GPLv3.

On the Red Hat Developer blog there have been a number of recent articles that cover various aspects Keycloak/RH-SSO integration. A recent DevNation Live Tech Talk covered Securing Spring Boot Microservices with Keycloak. This article discusses the features of Keycloak/RH-SSO that you should be aware of.

The all new and shiny Red Hat Decision Manager 7 has been recently released. Decision Manager 7 is the successor to Red Hat JBoss BRMS, our business rules and decision management platform. In this post we will have a look at the primary new features and provide instructions on how to get started with the new platform, either on your local machine or in an OpenShift Container Platform.
Red Hat Decision Manager 7 focuses on four main themes: Fit & Finish, Cloud-Native, Decision Model and Notation (DMN), and Business Optimizer.